


apoptosis

by starri



Series: carcinogen [1]
Category: B.A.P
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Violence, Mutant Powers, Mutant Rights
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 00:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7663969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starri/pseuds/starri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yongguk is a Truthseer. Deceits paint painful acrid drops of super-saturation on his reality. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, Yongguk muses sometimes, but fucked if he knows exactly what the universe’s bloated sense of irony wants with him.</p><p>Mutant AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	apoptosis

**Author's Note:**

> mutant AU
> 
> you say I have a inception AU that I have neglected? - then you would be right. I'm indulging in my fav tropes to see if I can get my writing grove back.

As always, the soft spot of reds that warms Yongguk’s vision warns him of Jieun’s appearance. It doesn’t, however, prepare him for Jieun’s wild eyes as she lunches herself towards him, long hair fanning out behind her in her haste.

She grabs a hold of his forearm, and before he can even think of protesting, teleports them to her car.

“Jieun, what?” Yongguk hisses out, fighting down the nausea that always accompanies the experience of being brutally forced through the film of reality by Jieun’s power.

“We have to go – the intel, I – they are going to leave him to die! –“

“Jieun.” Yongguk says again, strapping himself into the driver’s seat with one hand and grips Jieun’s arm assuringly with the other. “Calm down, what’s going on?”

Jieun’s eyes widen, then narrow as she takes a shuddering breath.

“I’ll tell you where to go. Drive.” She orders.

He does.

 

Yongguk didn’t notice the colours gradually dimming in the world until his powers kicked in fully at age twelve. His teacher was praising one of the students – Park something, he can’t recall anymore. What he does remember was the colour that cuts through the air, vivid and ugly, as Teacher drops praise after praise. Yongguk looked away, his eyes stinging - and suddenly he knew that Teacher was taking bribes from Park something’s parents, and that Teacher was slowly crumbling under the pressure of reality crushing his young, noble expectations of the education system. He bit down on his lip and stopped himself from reacting to the painful flashes of saturation wiring across his vision – even at age twelve he knew better than to reveal that he is a mutant.

He’s mutation isn’t telepathy. No, Natasha is the Telepath. Yongguk is a Truthseer. Deceits paint painful acrid drops of super-saturation on his reality. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, Yongguk muses sometimes, but fucked if he knows exactly what the universe’s bloated sense of irony wants with him.

 

 

“Central caught one. One of us.” Jieun says as they navigate their way out of the slums of the city right into the wild lonely stretches of country road. “An illusionist of some kind.”

Yongguk waits.

“They are going to let him die.”

“Central doesn’t give a fuck about us.” Yongguk reminds her.

“Not Central. The Wave is going to let him die.”

The sounds of Jieun’s cheap car fills the air, until Yongguk chokes out a strangled “Why?”

“Turns out our own kind doesn’t care about us either.” Jieun says, and Yongguk sees no flashes of colour to contradict Jieun’s revelation.

 

 

He never did register his mutation at Central, not out of rebellion, but out of self-preservation. Mutations of the mind are the most feared, because people still believe and treasure free will, even as Central strips humanity to their bare bones in the name of justice and unity. Natasha had taken one look at him and _knew_ – about his powers and his decision - and she nodded her approval and gave him the blessing he didn’t know he was seeking.

 

When he first met Jieun, he was already part of the Wave. He was staying with the Cube crew, helping guard their stash of Repressors – very, very illegal Repressors that Yongguk was illegally ingesting daily to mask his mutant genes from passing Enforcers aiming their Sensors at random citizens. Back then, the X-gene sensors were still crude and unreliable, and even the underground-chem-lab-produced Repressors were more than enough to fool them. Cube always had high quality Repressors though – which meant their little hideout also got a lot of unwanted attention from vicious mutants wanting to buy anti-detection drugs with their fists.

“Something’s going to happen,” Kiri nudged Yongguk, and nodded down the block. “Something involving a girl? You should probably get over there.”

Yongguk knew not to argue. Kiri’s predictions only span two minutes into the future, but he had never been wrong. “You’ll be okay here on your own?”

“Yeah, Joker’ll be here in a mo.”

A few blocks down in the direction Kiri pointed at, Yongguk glanced into an alleyway and was met with the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Jieun had short, bleached hair back then, pushed out of her face. She had always been small, and was utterly drawfed by the men advancing on her. Yongguk didn’t need to hear what they were saying to know what they want.

“Hey!” He grabbed the hood of one of the men and dragged him backwards onto the ground. He was straightening up with clenched fists when one of the men turned to him, and-

Natasha never used her power to take, only to borrow and listen and to seek undersanding, but this man could walk into peoples’ minds and take and change. It was Yongguk’s own power – tearing spikes of uncontrolled colour into his vision – that alerted him he’s being mind-controlled, but it didn’t stop his knees from buckling with a whispered “kneel” from the Telepath. _No wonder the girl was just standing there_ , Yongguk thought as he struggled desperately to regain control of his own limbs, _no wonder people fear us._

A line of searing fire exploded through the alley, sudden and violent, leaping jubilantly from man to man, growing brighter and brighter as the smell of burning flesh and screams of pain filled the alley. Yongguk was diving as soon as his limbs are freed, tackling the distracted Telepath into the ground, and throwing a few punches blindly for good measure. Avoiding the Telepath’s gaze, he looked up to see the girl with a cupped flame in one hand a reaching towards him with the other.

Jieun grabbed onto Yongguk’s arm, and a blush of soft red whispers across Yongguk’s vision, and suddenly Yongguk was on the rooftops trying not to throw up. Down below, men are screaming as a free dancing line of flames trapped them in like rats in a barrow. The tiny flame in Jieun’s palm snuffed out, and the unnatural free-running fire below disappeared, but the small fires caught on the clothing of the panicked men still burns.

“Oh my god.” Jieun had said, looking down at her hand with wonder in her eyes “I have a second power.”

 

 

“We are looking for an unmarked black car.” Jieun says, gripping the side of the seat with whitened knuckles. She’s staring out to the deserted stretch of road, “Hopefully we don’t miss them in this traffic.”

Yongguk manages a chuckle, despite the tension thick enough to cut through with a blunt knife. Jieun’s level of sarcasm increases proportionally to her level of stress. Yongguk’s always considers that one of the most charming things about her.

“Where are they taking this illusionist?” He asked, yelling slightly to be heard above his overworked engine

“Far from prying eyes and to be executed, I expect.” Jieun yells back, “They sent a Void.”

Yongguk almost curses. And then an unmarked black car comes into view as he turns the next bend in the winding road.

Jieun daintily makes a bowl shape with her right hand, a flame comes into life joyously in her palm. She’s turning on her pyrokinesis to estimate the range of the Void, but she needn’t have bothered. Yongguk can see a slight hint of yellow dusting the roads even as Jieun’s flame begins to flicker in and out of existence. This Void is obviously powerful, to be able to alter their powers even though they are still almost a kilometer away. There seem to be only on person in the car - the prisoner is probably in the trunk.

“I’m going to try to teleport into her car.” Jieun yells at him as they daw up behind the black sudan. “Try and keep me alive, yeah?”

Yongguk takes his eyes off the road in alarm, “Wait Jieun, you won’t be able to use your powers if you’re so close t-“

But with the faintest of red glossing over his almost fully saturated vision, Jieun teleports. She reappears in the back seat of the other car, and reaches out an elegant hand to slam the Void’s face into the steering wheel.

Yongguk’s vision begins to flicker between monochrome and saturation as the Void flickers on the boundary of consciousness. The black Sudan lurches, and Yongguk, fighting down nausea, hurriedly maneuvers Jieun’s old chucky jeep sideways into the other car, keeping it sandwiched between his own vehicle and the roadside fence in an attempt to stop it going out of control. Jieun slams the Void’s face down again, this time Yongguk’s vision stay in blessed grayscale as both cars come to a stop.

 

Yongguk can smell the gasoline even before he hurries out of the driver’s seat. It wouldn’t be the first time a mutant is burned to death in the country side. One more charred corpse would have made the news for a day or two, and then sink into the dark depth of society’s unreliable memory.

Yongguk drags the gasoline soaked man out of the trunk of the car, ripping off his blind fold.

The eyes that stares up at him are sharp and wide with fear.

“Please help me.” The man begs, and his voice, his voice is gravel made of gold. “Please help me. That woman! I don’t know who she is – I’ve been kidnapped, I – I don’t know – what is going on – “

And suddenly, Yongguk’s vision is filled with colour – wondrous and full of life. Every single thing the man in his arms said were lies. Soft lies that paint the world in colours intense and beautiful. And precipitously, Yongguk knows why Central is so quick to dispose of this man – why Wave isn’t even going to attempt to save him. This man can sell lies. He unleashes his untruths into the world like brightened jewels. He can make humanity crave his words, beg him to tell his stories, and he can make Yongguk see the beauty between the colours, beauty where he’s only ever seen pain before. Such a talent is a double edged weapon for causes that are built on words. Yongguk knows better than most why sometimes a flame is snuffed out just so that it would not burn the hand that holds the match.

 

“You’re safe with us.” Yongguk tells him, ignoring the soft whisper of blues that always accompanies his own deceptions, however small. “We are like you. Mutants.”

The man tucks his shaking frame into Yongguk’s torso more firmly, hides his face into Yongguk’s shirt. The stink of gasoline sinks into their clothes.

“Please untie me?” there’s a tremor of fear pitched high in the man’s voice – it’s fake. Yongguk knows by the colour of the man’s flushed ears.

He unties him anyways, and when the man says a shaky thank you – it is sincere and Yongguk is grateful. He helps the man stand before going over to Jieun to help deal with the unconscious Void. He is just about to offer a hand when he remembers –

The man is an illusionist, Jieun had said.

His head snaps back, but there is nothing, not even the colours that painted his world beautifully, where the man had been.

“Shit –“

Jieun looks up at his muttered curse, and notices the absence of their charge.

“What exactly was his mutation? What kind of illusions are we talking about here?” Yongguk asks

“I would suppose invisibility is a part of it.” Jieun answers with a sigh.

 

Yongguk’s ability is to find deceit in the world. When Jieun’s teleportation activates, warping reality, red dusts his vision to remind him that she is cheating the laws of physics. Yongguk have not met many illusionists, but every single one had painted a world of painfully wrong spikes of technicolour. Illusions are just three dimensional lies, after all.

Yongguk concentrates. He’s more shaken by the fact that he’s not picking up even a hint of pigment from the recently freed man than anything else that occurred.

Jieun had left the void tied up to a tree is trying to reason with the invisible man, shouting out promises of safety blindly – promises that warms Yongguk’s ears with their sweetness and sincerity and his vision with their rose tinted half-truths.

Then he catches it, just a flare of pastel purple on the edge of his vision. He makes a running jump, catching the invisible man only a few meters from the unconscious Void. The man grunts as he become visible again, fighting against Yongguk’s weight on his torso and arms.

“No.” Yongguk tells him “Don’t, it’s not worth it.”

“She’s a _Void_!” And Yongguk almost flinches at the sharp tang of hatred that poisons the man’s voice, the undercurrent of fear entirely too truthful “She’ll kill all of us as soon as she wakes up!”

“She has a concussion,” Jieun says as she approaches, “We’ll be long gone before she wakes. I’m a Teleporter.”

“And then what?” The man beneath Yongguk has stopped struggling, allows himself to be helped up by Yongguk’s hands, his face turned away in a defeated slump “When she wakes up, she’ll return to Central and there will be a man-hunt and I’ll be just as dead.”

“Stop being so difficult,” Jieun says, smiling softly as if Yongguk doesn’t still have a restraining hand on the man’s arm, “Didn’t I say we’ll help you?”

“Nothing will help unless you can change her memories or somet-“The Illusionist stops in the face of Jieun’s triumphant grin.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” He finishes lamely, slumping into Yongguk's arms as exhaustion hits.


End file.
